It’s been eight days since the Capitol was ransacked by a mob of MAGA supporters, Proud Boys, ex-military with tactical gear, and Nazis wearing disgustingly anti-Semitic t-shirts. The death count is six (for now), with a second police officer dying by duty-related suicide on Saturday. As more footage streams in—and the FBI says there’s still more to come—it will get uglier.So what have our conspiritualists been up to? We’ll run it down this week. Quick story: not a single one has walked back any of their bullshit in the aftermath of the Capitol siege. Some have doubled down.An unmasked Mikki Willis was involved in the siege as a “journalist,” giving an impassioned anti-vax, pro-liberty speech at a sideshow MAGA event in which he called the ransack that he had just taken part in “beautiful.” Christiane Northrup cheered on the alt-health berserkers during the end of her water fast. Zach Bush took to Instagram to sermonize, saying, “Just as viruses do not take down healthy humans, revolutions do not take down healthy governance.” Lori Ladd spoke in radiant non-sequiturs.Amber Sears announced she was “preparing for civil war” while her husband JP whined about free speech as his Parler account got nuked and Trump got booted off of Twitter. Meanwhile, Kelly Brogan said nothing publicly about the Capitol siege that we could find, but cashed in on the vibes with a bloated essay on “spiritual warfare.”We also learned a lot about Jacob Anthony Chansley nee Angeli, the Q-shaman, and his interdimensional conspirituality performance art—as well as his three-day jail fast that was resolved after a sympathetic judge guaranteed a Whole Foods delivery.Derek interviews RP Eddy, CEO of strategy and geopolitical intelligence firm, Ergo. Eddy previously served as Director at the White House National Security Council under Bill Clinton, Chief of Staff to US Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, and Senior Policy Officer to UN Secretary Kofi Annan. He shares his thoughts about the current state of national security.Show NotesSusannah Crockford on the Q-Shaman’s spiritual potpourriMatthew’s Twitter thread on Q-Shaman fastingCOVID and tribal eldersEugene Goodman’s fateful geniusChristiane Northrup’s prosperity gospel affiliateNorthrup as Auntie Good DeathLorie Ladd everything i
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Conspiratuality 34.
Insurrectionist influencers.
It's been eight days since the capital was ransacked by a mob of MAGA supporters, Proud Boys, ex-military with tactical gear, and Nazis wearing disgustingly anti-semitic t-shirts.
The death count is six for now, with a second police officer dying by duty-related suicide on Saturday.
As more footage streams in, and the FBI says there's still more to come, it will get uglier.
So, what have our conspiritualists been up to?
We'll run it down this week.
Quick story, not a single one has walked back any of their bullshit in the aftermath of the Capitol siege.
Some have doubled down.
An unmasked Mickey Willis was involved in the siege as a journalist giving an impassioned anti-vax pro-liberty speech at a sideshow MAGA event in which he called the ransack that he had just taken part in beautiful.
Christiane Northrup cheered on the alt-health berserkers during the end of her Waterfest.
Zach Bush took to Instagram to sermonize saying, just as viruses do not take down healthy humans, revolutions do not take down healthy governance.
Lori Ladd spoke in radiant non sequiturs.
Amber Sears announced she was preparing for civil war while her husband JP whined about free speech as his Parler account got nuked and Trump got booted off Twitter.
Meanwhile, Kelly Brogan said nothing publicly about the Capitol siege that we could find, but cashed in on the vibes with a bloated essay on spiritual warfare.
We also learned a lot about Jacob Anthony Chansley, also known as Jake Angeli, the Q Shaman, and his interdimensional conspirituality performance art, as well as his three-day jail fast that was resolved after a sympathetic judge guaranteed a Whole Foods delivery.
Derek interviews R.P.
Eddy, CEO of strategy and geopolitical intelligence firm Ergo.
Eddy previously served as Director at the White House National Security Council under Bill Clinton, Chief of Staff to U.S.
Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, and Senior Policy Officer to U.N.
Secretary Kofi Annan.
He shares his thoughts about the current state of national security.
This is the Conspiratuality Ticker, a weekly bullet point rundown on the ongoing pandemic of messianic influencers who spread medical misinformation and sell disaster spirituality.
So today there's so much to report on and discuss.
We've pretty much got one long ticker, then Julian's segment, the jab at the end.
And Derek's interview with R.P.
Eddy was just filed moments ago, so we haven't heard it yet.
But Derek, you can fill us in with insights from it as we go.
In brief, an intense amount of fallout, as is to be expected.
The death count now at six with the death by suicide of a Capitol Police officer on Saturday.
The arrest count is climbing.
The FBI is predicting hundreds more to come.
We don't know as of yet what the massive COVID fallout will be from this obvious Super Spurter event, but we do know that this is so horrible, this story, that three Congress people have now tested positive after being locked down with Republican reps who didn't wear masks and then mocked the aides that begged them to.
I want to point out that one of the people who came down with COVID is 75 and she just ended her battle with cancer and came out and now she has to deal with this.
Okay, so hundreds of charges filed with prosecutors warning many will be upgraded to sedition, which carries up to 20 years in prison.
Among arrestees were the Camp Auschwitz grizzly guy, the lectern dude.
He's not J.P.
Sears, but they've actually met for a photo op at some point recently.
Probably because of the resemblance.
And also, that son of the federal judge in New York, orthodox Jewish family, he won the runner's up prize for the FERS cosplay.
Also, the flex cuff guy in full tactical gear was arrested.
Now, the myth of the berserkers being working class or from the Rust Belt has been busted up by numerous reports of professionals being amongst the ranks.
There was some real estate agent who flew her private jet in or something like that the day before.
Also lots of Air Force people for some reason that I can't fathom.
And as Ronan Farrow just dropped in the last hour at the New Yorker, the mob included former US Marine Donovan Crowell, who's 50 years old.
He's a Persian Gulf vet.
Farrow's tweets, I haven't read the article yet, imply that the details point to substantial organization amongst far right groups with military experience.
Krall was wearing the Oathkeeper's Militia insignia.
There were also lots of tears over at hashtag noflylist, which really shows us the class entitlement on display with this event.
But also, interestingly, I think the blunt object that is the homeland security apparatus, at least in this case, because the homeland security and the FAA certainly have this terrible history of racial profiling, and that's arguably where it begins.
But the technological traps sprung on everyone pretty quickly here, regardless of where they were from or what they looked like.
And of course, this is in contrast to the absolute lack of preparation on the Capitol and how much that indicates that white supremacy is running the show when it comes to how the country deals with protesting.
R.P.
Eddy gives some interesting, you know, I wanted to talk to him.
I've interviewed him in the past and I wanted to talk to him because he's worked at the highest levels of national security under a number of administrations and he gives some interesting views.
I really wanted to chat with someone who doesn't have the same necessary belief systems as we do in these things and he gave some insights into why he thinks that there was so much restraint and he hopes that it doesn't Therefore, swing back into more violence for the next encounter, which is definitely a possibility.
Right, well, it'll be interesting to hear that.
So, planning-wise, like, how did this come to be?
Basically, everyone who I follow who works in disinformation reporting was on Twitter this week saying that they'd been screaming about an expected January 6th attack being openly discussed on Parler and Gab for months.
There are reports of the FBI forewarning the Capitol Police the day before, also of internal collusion amongst the Capitol Police.
One congresswoman, Mikey Sherrill, who's a retired Navy helicopter pilot from North Jersey, is claiming that three Republican congresspeople were giving rioters reconnaissance tours on the 5th.
Then of course we have Representative Boebert from Oregon tweeting out Pelosi's location from inside the chamber as it's going on.
And this week I learned the term stochastic terrorism, which is basically, you know, the definition of something that's Chaotic and poorly planned or planned in sort of disparate patterns with many actors with potentially competing goals and also a kind of plausible deniability from the top.
So I'm sure we'll be hearing more about that.
Now the National Guard is camped out throughout the Capitol Complex and vehicle traffic is closed on all approaches to the Hill.
And Airbnb cancelled all reservations in D.C.
for the next week.
Pretty devastating move, I'd imagine.
I mean, that's gotta be hundreds and hundreds of... Because, I mean, the Airbnb market in D.C.
is huge.
And I'm sure it would be packed for inauguration.
And everybody would be caught up in that sweep, right?
People who wanted to attend because they wanted to watch the inauguration as well, I imagine.
Absolutely, but given the time, I'm sure that people who were there to support Biden will understand.
Absolutely.
I wanted to add one thing there, too, with regard to those tours of the Capitol.
I mean, that appears to be even more irregular than we might think because they haven't been doing tours at the Capitol because of COVID.
Right.
And then suddenly on the day before, you have these groups traipsing through.
So intelligence services have also warned of violence in all or at all 50 state capitals over this coming weekend.
But I have seen reports that the Proud Boys have circulated an internal memo advising that they should stand down.
Who knows, though?
Also, shout out to the Proud Boys founder Gavin McGinnis, a fellow Canadian.
I hope you're in deep, deep trouble.
We have to understand, I think, to the extent that QAnon and conspirituality are driving forces, that these days leading up to the 20th present an existential moment for the movement and It's because they believed that Trump had sent them to the Capitol to be the storm in this last incursion.
And so those guys with the flex cuffs really were going to carry out the mass execution of deep state officials.
And I was listening to the Chapo Trap House guys who made a lot of hay out of the ineffectual LARPing nature of it all, that this was an insurrection undertaken for the selfies.
But one reason the mob have now totally incriminated themselves by having left their data on while quote unquote storming and presumably filming themselves smearing shit on the walls is that they were also waiting for more instructions via Trump's Twitter account.
And that's why Jack Dorsey turned off that account years too late.
and And I think it's also why we both should pay attention to, but also shouldn't pay too much attention to, or at least smart attention to, Jacob Anthony Chansley, the Q Shaman.
He's obviously a cartoon mascot distraction type person, but he also represents the kind of psychedelic tip of the spear for an extremely dangerous and militarized network of groups who, as we've already seen, are going to be totally willing to throw him under the bus as we've already seen, are going to be totally willing to throw him under the bus with MAGA people instantly And then, of course, he's put on blast by the craven hypocrite, Alex Jones.
And Julian, you were going to tell us about that.
Alex Jones has had enough.
Now it turns out hell hath no fury like an unhinged conspiracy theorist who's had his government-controlled tornado thunder stolen.
Alex Jones is the infamous right-wing radio host I'm sure familiar to a lot of listeners and InfoWars disseminator whom the New York Times dubbed America's leading conspiracy theorist.
He was instrumental in popularizing the Pizzagate debacle that prefigures QAnon, and the idea that Sandy Hook was staged using crisis actors.
And that led to families of tragically murdered children being stalked and harassed by folks who I would not be surprised to find out were close to the front of the Capitol insurrection last week.
Jones has also said that he believes the moon landing was faked, that the Oklahoma City bombing and 9-11 were government false flag operations.
He's both an anti-vaxxer and a proponent of white genocide paranoia.
And yeah, he really does believe the government can create and move tornadoes around at will.
But QAnon, it appears, has become a bridge too far for Alex Jones.
It turns out that before he was taken into custody, Jacob Anthony Chansley made a guest appearance by phone and tried to explain his perspective to an increasingly irate Jones, who said, Q is like people who look at clouds.
One sees a giraffe, one sees an elephant, one sees an alligator, one sees a clown.
He refers to the now famous buffalo-horned domestic terrorist as Jake the Barbarian, ...and a Q wizard, while challenging him to explain, if Q knows everything, what is going to happen to Trump.
Listen, dude, shamanism is the oldest religion in the world.
They use singing, drumming, dancing, and they use elaborate, like, dress, you know, the headdress, the face paint... And you saw how it ended up for him, didn't you?
...to change the quantum realm through sound, through electromagnetic activity... I understand magical powers.
No, it's not about magic, dude.
We're talking about physics here, Alex.
We're talking about physics.
Let Matt Bracken talk here.
You are a shamanic wizard.
We get that.
You keep interrupting me, Alex.
I love you, dude.
I love you, but you gotta let me talk.
You keep interrupting me.
Because you're lying!
Because you're full of shit!
That's why!
Because every goddamn thing out of your people's mouths doesn't come true!
And it's always, oh, there's energy, and oh, now we're done with Trump.
You said he was the messiah!
You said he was invincible!
You said it was all over!
Then we're all going to Gitmo now.
Oh, he's part of a larger thing of Q. I will not suffer your Q people after this.
I knew what you were day one.
I know what you are now.
And I'm sick of it!
I'm sick of all these witches and warlocks and pumpkin popsums and everything.
Oh, God.
Sorry.
Bye-bye to you, I can't talk to you anymore, Jesus Christ.
Yeah, that is, I mean, what a craven, hypocritical, like... I mean, all this says is that Alex Jones is a bigger bully than Jake Angeli ever could be.
And, I mean, incredible to hear this kind of...
Just, I just, I can't, I can't stand it.
I can't stand it.
Cause there's something about, like, like, say what we want about, about, uh, about the, the, the Q Shaman.
He, he does at least effect, uh, a consistent if, um, completely potpourri-ed, brain-melted belief system that he actually stands behind.
If he's LARPing, he believes it.
He's committed.
And there's nothing about that with Jones at all as a cultural figure.
And you also have to realize that Angeli, or Chansley, is a fan of Jones.
He says, I love you.
His worldview is probably heavily influenced by this man.
And then you have your deity yelling down at you and hanging up on you.
Not that he doesn't deserve it in some capacity, but the dissonance in Jones, it's really sad to watch what happens when somebody who has a level of power and an MLM that's working very well for him start to lose his revenue stream and his
I think bullying is really the the perfect term for it and you know I would imagine that Jake shows up there thinking that it's gonna go down very differently than it does and for me I see I see Jones being threatened and needing to deliver the smackdown but there's also there's another layer there that has to do with ridiculing and shaming, which, you know, of course, the substance of which we might somewhat resonate with, but it's pretty gross.
And it's absolutely projective because he presents this like utter self-own of his own inconsistencies.
But now he has an excellent target that's very close to home for him that he can now distinguish himself from.
And then of course, somehow this goes viral and there's two million views on Twitter or something like that as though, oh, Alex Jones is finally making sense.
No, he's not.
Alex Jones is capturing market share.
Well some of it too is people just love to see Alex Jones losing his shit and he learned that a long time ago that the more he goes over the top the more views he gets.
I just want to add here too as a sort of a side note there's a lot of talk about holding people accountable in different ways and I'm certainly not suggesting that the new age profiteers of the last decade or two should be held accountable for the capital insurrection but I will say that a lot of this Very, very familiar language around how quantum physics is related to shamanism and how it has effects on the outside world.
This is that taken to its logical conclusion by someone who's clearly gotten very swept up in his own mythology.
And shamanism isn't a religion.
It's a function of many societies in previous times.
Current as well, current as well.
Yeah, but the term was given specific to northern Russia and the Siberian.
But it is it is a phenomenon.
But this is like saying that Hinduism is an ancient religion.
It is absolutely not.
It's a it's a modern it's a modern branding.
And really, for lack of better terms from Europeans not knowing how to classify things.
And so they come with these umbrella terms.
And that's what shamanism is.
But that's getting caught up in all of this because he's the Q shaman and he's just spouting nonsense about the function of what the shaman is in the society overall.
That's really been troubling me.
He's certainly spouting nonsense, but as Matthew said too, I do believe that when he's standing on that dais and he is yelling and singing the things that he's yelling and singing, some part of him does believe that he's affecting the quantum level and reclaiming the Capitol building for the forces of light and casting out demons and some part of him does believe that he's affecting the quantum level and reclaiming the Capitol Maybe, but did you see the video of him in the mall in Arizona or wherever he's from?
Because he's in on the joke before he goes and does it.
So I wonder how much of it actually he does believe that and how much is performative.
Well it is performative and my sense is that it's believed and I remember seeing that clip of the Arizona mall incursion where he basically walks out with his bullhorn and terrorizes a bunch of senior citizens about why they're sitting in the mall because Because the mall's logo looks like the man-boy love triangle, whatever, whatever, and obviously this means that the Arrowhead Mall in wherever he is, Tucson, is a den of pedophilia.
And yeah, he does mug for his selfie stick before he exits the bathroom or wherever he put on his costume, and then he walks out into the hall, but there's kind of like this...
I don't know, ritualized communion with the viewer, not to make too grandiose about it, but he does seem to believe that he's communicating with somebody in some kind of integral way, and he's very direct about his messaging.
And so, yeah, I'm torn as to his integrity.
I mean, I don't think that he would, I don't think this story about his three-day fast because he wasn't fed organic food would have leaked to the media through his mother, no less, were he not in direct contact no less, were he not in direct contact with her, but also explaining, I really can't take this food.
This sounds like somebody who is really buying into their particular role and their belief system.
That's what makes him fascinating in a way that I don't think should just be sort of caricatured or blown off as a cartoon.
Well, I know we have channelers and kundalini yogis coming up, but I think maybe an episode on shamans makes sense too, because that is a term that has been abused like no other in these circles, so we should put a pin in that one.
And just to, you know, end with the Q Shaman for now, I just want to point listeners to an article that's going to be in the show notes that comes from next week's guest, who is going to be speaking to us as a professional anthropologist, Susanna Crockford, also a religious studies scholar who spent a year in Sedona or more.
writing a book about New Age spirituality, and she has a lot to say about channelers, especially the QAnon type.
And she wrote a great piece for Religious Dispatches that I'll just quote from here.
She writes, in the hour-long podcast episode that Chansley appears on now, one thing that isn't clear yet is that he's left a substantial body of work behind.
behind him.
There's a library of Q Shaman materials under various names.
In this podcast episode, he goes by the name of Yellowstone Wolf.
And the episode or the podcast is with a UFO disclosure type promoter.
And he discusses his self-published book, which is written under yet another name, which is Lone Wolf and his experiences with extraterrestrials and UFOs, psychedelic use and the purpose of meditation and raising consciousness.
He He goes through the gamut of new age themes, fractal energy, frequencies, solar cycles, personal ascension leading to galactic ascension, chakras, the universe, light codes, overcoming negative emotion, hundredth monkey collective, the flower of life and sacred geometry, the divine is within, be your own guru, astrology, and so on.
He advertises his now-defunct website, Starseed AcademySpace, and promotes LifeWave patches and a multi-level marketing scheme that he claims cured his father of cancer and liver disease.
So we have this amazing archetype of basically every influence and possible sort of mechanism of self-promotion and self-examination all collapsing into one figure here.
And I think he's going to provide a lot of insight as this kind of, as I said, the psychedelic tip of the spear for QAnon and conspirituality.
And also like reading this paragraph, what occurred to me was how flexible and nimble this spirituality is, that with all of these influences, this is not a person who can really become an apostate.
And that's what makes it particularly jarring to hear him get reamed out by Alex Jones because, you know, somehow I think this is somebody who's used to Whenever he encounters resistance, he'll say, oh, well, you know, according to chakra theory or according to this brand of turmeric or whatever, this, this question can be answered.
And so, uh, it's, it's almost like I see him bringing a generative approach to new age spirituality, uh, where Alex Jones wants to basically have the entire buffet, but pick and choose according to who's in power and who isn't.
Reading that quote, what jumped out at me when I was studying religion in college, there were a few books that I read because I was very pulled into the theory of everything idea.
And I read two books by Helena Blavatsky, and I read a book by Manley P. Hall.
And listening to that paragraph, this is straight up from theosophy.
Right, right.
So it's recombinant, it's buffet style.
How can you actually stray?
But also, how could you measure success in your spiritual path?
It's really interesting.
Yeah, I mean, this is something that I talked about this week on Instagram.
Reality always calls your bluff.
So I think with so many of these more cultish, prophetic kind of groups, if the ideology is Extrapolating itself into the outside world in terms of making predictions about the world or making claims that are attestable, well, reality will call your bluff at some point, and hence the nimbleness that I think you're identifying here, right?
That you gotta keep pivoting and morphing.
I want to talk about the Capitol again.
As more and more footage is compiled and analyzed from last week's Capitol Insurrection, just how violent and dangerous it was and how much more tragically worse it could have easily gotten is becoming clearer.
Behind the entitled LARPing vandals parading through and mugging for selfies lurks a much more sinister mood involving zip ties, homemade napalm pipe bombs, and a mob mentality that we now know was baying for blood.
Amongst the outnumbered and overwhelmed Capitol Police fighting not only to protect the building and the lawmakers inside, one of whom, Brian Sicknick, has died, one of the cops I should say, were black officers who have now started speaking out about their experience.
I'm referring now to a January 9th article on BuzzFeed.
In which, fearful of retaliation, two black officers talked anonymously about enduring racist abuse and fighting what they call a heavily trained group of militia terrorists their superiors had failed to prepare them to adequately face.
They also talk about police officers from across the country who were with the mob, flashing their badges and expecting to be let in.
I want to just tie in here to the Mickey Willis story that we featured on our transmissions page this week, because in his comments on several social threads, Willis repeats his version of the story in which the invading force is peaceful and saying positive things to the Capitol Police as they advance, like, we fought for you.
Hey Mike Pence!
Hey Mike Pence, how you doing buddy?
We fought for you, they're saying to the Capitol Police, right, when others wanted to abolish you.
We don't want to harm anyone, is what one of the things Mickey Willis said they were saying.
Now the black cop in the BuzzFeed interview says, they're telling us they're on our side and doing this for us as I'm getting punched in the face and pepper sprayed by them.
I'm sure everyone has seen the terrifying footage of the lone black Capitol Police officer Eugene Goodman retreating in phases gradually up the steps behind him as a brazen group who has breached the doors saunters toward him with dark intent.
This group is led by a cute sweatshirt clad aggressive white guy who's posturing like an angry invincible hero in his own action film.
Yeah, that's incredible.
That guy's body language was so intense.
It would be easy to see Officer Goodman running away and fearing for his life, which of course he was, and of course anyone would do, but analysis of the video reveals an heroic split-second decision to distract the ringleader with a quick shove Before using his own body to lure the group in the opposite direction of the door to the Senate chamber in which officials were cowering.
Without Eugene Goodman, the fallout of these events would almost certainly be a lot worse.
Now you may ask, what of the Q-Merch repping self-described poster boy for the insurrection that led that little group?
And Goodman ended up misdirecting.
Well, I'm happy to say he has been fired from his forest registry job, and he joins others on the growing list of now-arrested seditionists sitting currently in a Polk County jail.
All right, so we've got to talk about Mickey Willis.
This week we published on our transmissions page an article called Plandemic's Mickey Willis Joins and Praises Violent Capital Mob and we'll of course link to it.
But the skinny is that I think on the 7th we got sent footage from a page on Reddit That showed about a 25 second clip of one of the Capitol doors being breached.
I don't know which door it is, but as the camera pans, it settles very squarely on Mickey Willis's beautiful face, unmasked, looking up, gazing up at his iPhone, held aloft as he is Filming the action and the violence unfolding in front of him.
Now, we started to put the story of his day together.
After that, we had already known that he was going to be at an event headlining along with people like Roger Stone and Mike Smith, who is the producer of Out of the Shadows, which is the main QAnon
Recruiting film also Ty and Charlene Bollinger who are proponents of the Truth About Cancer website and they are kind of like anti-chemotherapy advocates but of course they'll sign on to any other Anti-public health measure as well.
Then we've got Del Bigtree and also Dr. David Martin on the same billing.
And there's Mickey Willis's face right on the placard in the bottom left-hand corner.
And so he was scheduled to speak at this event.
We've got the URLs and everything.
They're still live.
And he then appeared at this poorly attended event Maybe, I think that it's in front of the White House, is that correct?
And the White House is about a full mile from the Capitol?
Am I right about that?
No, I think it was right around this corner.
I mean, you can hear during his speech.
The sirens?
Right, okay.
So we're not sure on the actual location, right.
Well, he does mention that he's out of breath as he takes the stage because he just took part in this, I think he calls it an incident, but he describes how the human organism is rising up and it's a beautiful thing to see and it has nothing to do with partisanship.
Yeah.
And so then of course he takes to Facebook as this gets further and further more broadcast, including he makes the New York Times riot where he is seen giving a kind of auto-commentary into his iPhone as the violence surges behind him.
Well, not only that, he's also talking about how he's just been sprayed in the eyes, right?
So he's the hero and the victim.
Right, right.
There's a lot of pepper spray that he's been hit with.
I think my understanding is that if you're actually hit with pepper spray, you do not walk around the corner and give a speech.
I think that you're probably out for the count and that's why the Portland protesters and everybody else in actual Antifa puts out milk and bottled water that of course the cops come around and trash before they can get to them.
Is the milk organic?
The milk does not have to be organic, but Mickey then takes to Facebook to explain himself that that does not go very well.
And then he actually came onto our page and gave a little self-justification, which also did not go very well.
So you've got all of the links for that.
Yeah, I mean the questions for me are, will this matter to his upcoming projects, which he says in a video from December that we unearthed today, or yesterday, that he's been involved with actually making stuff with and for Lynn Wood, who's Trump's QAnon lawyer.
Is it going to matter to his Plandemic customers?
Is this going to, who knows?
I mean, my experience with accountability in all of these circles is that it just doesn't exist.
Well, it'll probably improve his profile.
It might.
I did reach out to a very good friend of the pod, Jamie Baker, for some resources on whether or not his circumstance,
Uh, speech featuring positive rhetoric around the ransacking, uh, as it was going on, whether that would constitute incitement, and she sent me a resource that we'll provide to you in the show notes from the ACLU that shows that the, uh, statutes for incitement are actually really, really high, the thresholds for proof.
Uh, so probably not.
Probably not, but I also wanted to just, you know, for those of you who have the spoons to get through it, maybe we should put in the timestamp for this, but there's at one point in his speech where he goes full-on soppy and he talks about his children, who I guess are presumably at home, and he seems to break down in tears and talk about how they deserve the childhood that he had where he was allowed to ride his bike.
I'm not quite sure what's going going on with that.
But he also talked about they don't deserve to be poisoned and so on.
And I had this moment where I was watching and I was like, even a propagandist who is like a demonstrable liar and obviously incredibly even a propagandist who is like a demonstrable liar and obviously incredibly self-involved, such as to make himself the center of the such as to make himself the center of the action
Um, even somebody like that who has two children is somebody who has two children.
And the, and the, and so, and so there was this, I'm like, I'm watching these crocodile tears, or at least that's what they seem to be for me, because I can't believe anything else the guy says, and he's talking about his children, and I know that, yes, the children are real.
I've seen them in films, and they...
I don't know.
It's extremely emotionally confusing for me to think about the children wrapped up in this stuff and how they are both instrumentalized by people.
I mean, even we see this in JP and Amber Sears rocking their baby as they make transphobic comments and whine about authoritarianism.
The children are the sort of paradoxical focus point of everybody's passions, but they're also completely ignored with regard to, I don't know, ethics and supportive relationship and what would actually make for a reasonable world to live in.
I also want to point out that this back and forth with Willis is one of the most frustrating.
We've shared a lot of videos and articles and different things he's said, but the reason is because he's always just speaking to the crowd he's in front of.
He recently had a phone conversation with a friend where he expressed that he wanted to create a video showing left and right coming together and he wanted to use this person as an example of of that.
But if you listen to his interview with Mike Adams, at one point, it's about 12 minutes in, he says, the left hates the truth.
And so he's talking to the founder of Bright Eon, where his Red Pill Expo video that we've covered is hosted.
And this is right after admitting he works with Lin Wood.
He's a great guy.
He had made the Kyle Rittenhouse video.
He goes all of this about being, I was the hero of the left, the far left, and now I'm here to be an American.
But then he says stuff like that, and it's kind of tiring tracking all of it, but the broader point I'm making is if you trust anything he says, it's just going to immediately become something else depending on the audience that he's in front of.
Which is exactly why when a number of listeners, I think with really good intentions and helpfully suggested that, well, maybe we should interview him because he's shown up on our Facebook feed to defend himself.
And I mean, the ethics of that would be just totally wrong to give this guy any more platform than he's had already.
I mean, I think that the elephant in the room with the people that we actually speak about is that to the extent that there are now, what, an average of 4,000 COVID deaths per day in the US, something like 250,000 infections, new cases.
One in three people in Los Angeles now are believed to have had COVID over the last year.
I don't know about you guys, but I feel like we often stay a little bit to the lighter side of the real implications of, not just, I'm not talking about the militarized language or, you know, the Sasha Stone stuff, but to promote anti-science attitudes and vaccine hesitancy during such a critical moment.
is like murderous it's it's it's it's more and more dawning on me i'm not thinking about these people uh in in i mean i do try to i do want to understand them i do want to uh take their views seriously but the actual impacts of what they're doing um It's grave, it's really grave.
The number of people who got confused by Plandemic can translate into a death count.
And so when we say, okay, in good faith, let's try to sort it out so that we can have some kind of, can't we all get along moment on Facebook Live with Mickey Willis is just like, No, there's no way.
Yeah, I wanted to say too, in all of his self-defense, one of the things he repeated on multiple threads is, when he signed up to speak at that sideshow, it was called something else.
And then they changed the name.
And then he tried to get them to change the name back, and it's like, dude, it doesn't matter what the name is on the banner, look at all the people you're standing next to.
Yeah, Roger fucking Stone.
Roger Stone.
If you did have this big moral pedestal you've put yourself on, well then you would have cancelled your appearance if they didn't change the name.
Yeah, and one of the things I heard him saying somewhere else as well, and I forget because there's so many different things this week that we tracked with him, but he said something about how the big problem with censorship is that the only places he can go and speak now is places he would normally avoid.
So it's like he's pandering to people who are center or left as if, well, this is the only place I can be heard.
Poor me, censorship, free speech, blah, blah.
And he also announced on that video that he's creating a media organization with Brian Swan, who another person just deep in conspiracy world land.
There's so many things we're going to have to track, but now that Jack Dorsey has said that he's going to work on a more open source social media platform more akin to Bitcoin mining, which is Which I am personally a fan of, but the thing about Bitcoin mining is that there's no moral compass there.
It's just purely a means of transfer of economies.
But with that happening and now Willis starting, and I'm sure there's going to be a Trump media arm that's going to start.
We have Newsmax, we have OAN.
We're going to really have to see what Which of these media organizations hit and what they're putting forward, because that's going to be a thing.
They got what they wanted.
Fake news is now a thing, right?
Just one more thing on Willis, which is that What sticks in my brain, especially about the still that is screencapped from the Reddit video of him, without a mask, gazing up into the screen of his iPhone so that he can get a good shot of people muscling their way past the Capitol Police,
is that where he seems to want to place his virtue is in the capacity for neutral observation and a kind of almost Buddhist, radiant, I don't know, like, his both sides-ism is tinged with a kind of spiritual equanimity and a piety that I think is really
I mean, disingenuous and ridiculous, but I think it's really, really compelling for those that he ensnares.
So we're looking at influencer responses this week as well.
Like, how are these people dealing with what's just happened?
Are they walking it back?
Apparently not.
Are they doubling down?
Uh-huh.
What are they doing?
Christiane Northrup appeared a couple days ago in one of her IGTV videos wearing a small sheriff's star affixed to her deep purple zip-up velour hoodie, signaling thus her solidarity with militia groups.
Right in the aftermath of the Capitol being stormed.
She reported on the progress, of course, of her water fast, endorsed Make America Free Again, which is an organization that sort of helps people to put together mask-less meetings around the country with hugs and no social distancing.
She directed followers to look at David Martin's anti-vax misinformation about mRNA vaccines.
He was one of the people on that stage with Mickey Willis.
And the good doctor encouraged practitioners with enough guts to order the vaccines and inject it into an orange.
I think she wants people to run some kind of experiment at home to see what happens with the supposedly horribly toxic substance in the vaccine.
Wait a minute, she...
Are some people supposed to steal the vaccines?
Well, I think she's referring to the portion of her audience who are, you know, alt med practitioners.
Yeah.
So people who can order the vaccine, get a box of vaccines and then inject a bunch of it into some oranges and see what happens.
I know every year when I go to my doctor for my flu shot, how she just hands me the needle to put it in myself.
Doesn't she give you an orange?
It's California.
Now, most of Christiane Northrup's transmission is reporting on, of course, her latest reading with a medium who has assured her that she would live to see the fruits of her labor, and that the fast was the most generous thing that she and her followers could have done for their bodies during this time.
And then, Christiane, to the camera, this was good to hear, because it hasn't been easy But the most noteworthy theme... So there's like a parallel journey of penitence and struggle and strife that she was able to put herself through that coincided with the Sixth, right?
Yeah, it does feel like there's some sense that the Fast is her way of spiritually participating from a distance in the Great Awakening that was happening at the Capitol.
The most noteworthy theme from this channeled information she's reporting on was about this being a time in which many people would die or quote-unquote leave the earth plane and then she would go back and forth between that and how the new Netflix special that we've actually been reviewing for the pod called Surviving Death is so important.
So let's just let her speak for herself.
Here's a clip of her climactic moment in that video.
Oh boy, okay.
Well, I do know where this is going to go.
It's going to where so many of you are.
Someone said we're like imaginal cells in the butterfly.
So what are imaginal cells?
They are the cells that only begin to grow and create the butterfly when the caterpillar is dying.
And so many things are now dying.
So many things.
I'm going to also post Janine's website, Janan's website, because she is so wonderful, just like Karen Bauer.
You know, we've had so many people who have been so helpful during this time.
But I think the main thing is to understand that on some level, there is no death.
And we're at the time of the Great Awakening.
The other thing Janan told me is that I will be alive to see the fruits of everything I've done since I was born.
Well of course you will!
That's right now.
And of course, every single one of you That's called looking in the mirror, like today.
Like if I look in the mirror, if I go into my bathroom right now and I look at my face, I'm like, yeah, that's everything I've ever done.
Not only that, but you are the youngest that you will ever be right now.
Oh my God, it's so deep.
That's incredible.
Well, I think she's also implying that she will, that whatever is going on in the Great Awakening right now, that the Capital Insurrection is sort of part of, she will live to see it all finding its resolution as we enter fifth dimensional Lightworker reality.
Yeah, the thing is that from the perspective of somebody who is at the center of their own universe, that can be very true because if you conceive of your own death as being the kind of apotheosis of the rest of the world, then why not?
It reminds me of that just nonsensical idea that I've seen as a meme for decades, which is, we are the ones we've been waiting for.
And I know some people have explained it as being like, you know, it's an empowering thing.
But there's also this sense that all of history has led to us being the perfect beings.
Yeah, the whole thing just reminds me of that ridiculous bullshit.
Well, and then the dark... Of course, this is the thing always with Dr. Northrup's videos, right?
Is that there is the very pleasant grandma piece of her just recounting her New Age sort of aphorisms.
It's so fucking dark.
I mean, she's talking about how death, death, ultimately death is not real.
And, and the fact that she's got that little star on her chest and this is, you know, a few days after the insurrection, there's something she's saying there.
She reminds me of like my, my grandmother on my mother's side.
I mean, not in terms of temperament, but just kind of like the company that she would keep or the conversations she would have or the kind of socializing that she would do.
And I'm thinking of, it's almost like she's talking to her followers from the hair salon or something like that.
And the curlers are in and the plans for tea or the church social are being made later on.
But really, it's like they're also preparing for funerals or they're talking about the dead bodies in the basement or they're...
There's something really, really disjunctive about it, and I can hear that sort of ghoulish quality underneath everything.
And I also wanted to point out that at the beginning of that video, she says that she reminds her audience that Well, she doesn't remind her audience.
She says that the medium tells her that the first thing that she said was that her late partner, who died somewhere in the spring of 2020, I think, February or March or something like that, that the medium said, he came to you to die.
And that gave her some kind of, I don't know, relief or something like that.
And so there's this obsession with being able to absorb and to talk about and to be creative with the notion of both loved ones dying, but also everybody dying.
And somehow that that's all going to be okay.
It's bizarre.
One of my grandmothers owned and operated a trailer park on a highway, and my other grandmother worked as a seamstress in a sweatshop.
Maybe that's why my bullshit detector goes off the charts when I hear stuff like what these people are saying.
What I think when I hear that is just, what would you have done if you were there?
Like, when I see all of these influences recovering, besides Mickey, because at the very least, at least he was there, and whatever he's spinning out of it now, he had the wherewithal and courage to actually go and be a part of it, whereas all these other people just espousing on Instagram all this nonsense bullshit is really hard to listen to.
He had the wherewithal and the courage, but he also had the funding and the impetus, because he's a filmmaker and that footage is going to be gold for whatever the fuck he goes on to do, right?
Right, but some of these other influencers have the finances to be there.
I don't think that's the barrier.
Sure, yeah.
But it's not necessarily their vibe.
It's like if Northrop could have been guaranteed a stage to play her harp on, Uh, in a fancy, you know, Washington hotel lobby or something like that while this demonstration was going on.
That would have been ideal, right?
And ideally that, you know, the hotel lobby would have been protected from, you know, the, the outside, but you could see the flashing sirens, but then the, the, you know, the sound guy could focus back on the, the harp strings and stuff like that.
That actually makes my, that actually makes my point.
Like protesting is not supposed to be ideal.
Yes, okay, but we're gonna get into the role that conspirituality plays in the idea of bearing witness to or holding space for, you know, momentous events that are then sort of translated into narcissistic, you know, spiritual aspirations.
So we'll get to that.
That's the Shyvana story.
Laurie Ladd, who is Christiane Northrop, or who was at one point her flavor of the week's favorite channel, perhaps a few months ago.
Lori Ladd, who is the self-claimed ambassador to Earth of the Galactic Federation, on Tuesday morning endorsed the storming of the Capitol as exactly what the shifting of consciousness looks like as we ascend.
Now, she doesn't directly name the events of last week, but refers to everything that is happening out there.
She goes on to encourage her followers not to buy into the loud voices of fear.
And she discusses how much unprecedented censorship and blocking there is of free speech right now, and that this reveals that we've been programmed and lied to for so long.
Quoting Lori Ladnow, this is exactly how we go into a 5D plane, 5D consciousness, which is inevitably what we are doing because it is the design of what Earth intended millions of years ago.
Everything we are navigating right now is perfect, but it's not easy.
Yeah, she needs a new couch or something like that.
She doesn't look so comfortable on the couch.
Yeah, you know, in this one there was a manic gleam in her eye that I haven't quite seen before.
I feel like there's something really boiling up for her.
She encouraged A distinction between the 3D human lens that worries about safety and freedom and choice and how are we going to get through this and then the 5D perspective that says this huge evolution in consciousness has to happen this way and is perfect and you are safe.
Gleefully grinning, she hits her peak of ecstatic apocalyptic prophesying right here in the clip that I want to run and just listen to who she claims to have channeled a few days previously.
We wanna be the eye of the storm.
Remember, the eye of the storm.
We're in the storm.
It's going.
And it's gonna look like a movie that you have never seen before.
That you can't push pause on.
You can't exit out of the movie theater.
You're in.
By the way, you chose to be here.
Don't forget, you incarnated to be here at this time, the most magical time.
You know, I did a guided journey a couple days ago on my Patreon community and Prince came through.
This is a gift.
Devour it.
Devour every now moment and everything you're experiencing.
But he says, I promise you, if you were to exit out of your body right now and become and move back into that higher dimensional consciousness that you are, you would regret it.
You would want to be right back in at the biggest show.
Oh, fuck off!
You can have your Galactic Federation at Prince.
It's the most miraculous, greatest show consciousness has ever seen and experienced.
This isn't about politics, it's not about vaccines, it's not about right and wrong, it's not about these things that we're seeing physically in the external.
It is and it isn't.
It is in the sense that we're standing in this, we're physically seeing that stuff, but it is all about a massive energetic shift.
And so what we are battling is energy.
It's an energetic pull of lower consciousness or darkness, whatever you want to call it.
Darkness is only consciousness that is in a lower frequency that hasn't shifted into more light.
So it moves out of the shadow.
Right.
The battle that we're in right now is energetic.
It's consciousness.
Is this going on?
Are we keeping players?
Into light.
15 more seconds.
Good shit.
Literally dragging dark into light.
Oh, I'd like to, oh gosh.
So of course, what are we going to see?
The only way you drag darkness into light is grabbing the darkness.
Yeah, unbelievable.
The thing that really, really hits me again hard about that is this, there's this combined kind of self-contradictory thing that's going on where she's simultaneously almost like ecstatically excited About what the events that are happening in the outside world represent in terms of her metaphysical narrative, and more detached from reality than ever in terms of the abstractions she uses to talk about it.
It sounds like, um, it really sounds like a child playing at uh pretending that they are navigating a boat through a storm and that they're trying to affect the emotion of bravery and they're telling the people other people that they fantasize are in the boat that things are going to be okay but uh the waves are rocky it all sounds like a
It all sounds like a game, and I don't know enough about Prince, but what do you guys think?
Would he be pilled or not pilled?
Because my first instinct is that, you know, I channeled Prince, and he told me that I was an asshole.
Prince was a huge Christian.
I mean, he was a very firm believer in God.
But I'll just say this to Loyolad, fuck off!
Like, you can have your little aliens, but you can't have Prince.
You can't have Prince, right.
All right, in other news, J.P.
Sears might have lost his deal with Sounds True.
Perhaps, we don't know.
At least we've seen a DM that has been circulated widely on social media that says, thank you for contacting Sounds True with your concerns regarding author J.P.
Sears and the feedback you have shared regarding his removal.
With his ongoing social media commentary, we believe he has been increasingly sowing seeds of confusion that we do not feel are a healthy response to the global pandemic.
Nor contribute to our collective good.
As a result, we have decided to remove his products from our website.
Now, if that also includes ditching whatever inventory would still be available through third-party sellers or through Amazon, I suppose that would be extra good.
So we'll see how that goes.
Meanwhile, he is posting on Parler before that got taken down a picture of Mark Zuckerberg with a Hitler mustache and in an SS uniform with the swastika on the red armband replaced with a Facebook insignia and a joke about you will have to restrict your account because you won't conform to community standards.
So a lot of whining about, and of course anti-semitic whining, about free speech and censorship, which is nonsensical because of course he can continue speaking in his bathroom.
And I just want to, I was going to do a longer piece this week, and I know we wanted to focus on the influence.
I just want to say it's just such a ridiculous argument.
The First Amendment does not affect the private market, the free market, and it's specific to government.
And it also has to do with responsible speech that is written into it.
So this whole argument that he's putting forward and the other ones is just is nonsense on the face.
Now, his beloved wife, Amber Sears, published an Instagram story that says, I'm very concerned for our democracy.
I believe this election was stolen and all future elections are compromised.
The media is twisting reality and no one really knows what's real anymore.
I'm personally preparing for a lot more civil unrest and a potential civil war.
Neither side is going to walk away I pray for the mass awakening of humanity daily.
I continue to hold the hope and faith that the light will win despite my worry and anxiety about our future.
Of course, she goes on.
She's still posting, you know, her results from her postpartum workouts and, you know, spurning haters and so on.
So that's all rolling over and over.
We also picked up a story or a post from a woman named Shivani Kumara.
Who will put into the show notes from our own Facebook screen caps of it along with some commentary, but just a few notes from her post.
She's at the January 6th event.
She says, today was epic.
There's a lot of caps in this post.
I'm not quite sure why.
I'm honored to have followed the calling to shine my love light here and be witness to this momentous day in our collective experience.
Almost all of those words are capitalized.
She talks about, you know, she loved hearing Rudy Giuliani and Vernon Jones and Madison Cawthorn speak.
This is the third time I've been called to DC to be a pillar here.
And basically the post is, and this is what I was getting at earlier, is that, is that I think a primary way in which conspiritualists will participate in events like this is by giving a kind of battleground chaplaincy blessing to those who are actually charging forward.
So, they will go and meditate, they will go and pray and chant, they will visualize light, they will, you know, visualize everybody getting along.
And that was a very common experience that I had in one of the cults that I was in that wherever there was any kind of, you know, cultural conflict or protest that the leader always wanted us to go out and proselytize generally by, you know, doing a prayer circle just sort of adjacent to the event.
And that's another thing that I wanted to bring up is that sometimes you'll see people involved, conspirituality type people involved in crisis events like this, not because they give a shit about the actual issue or about the politics involved or who's going to get hurt.
But because it provides a kind of way of operationalizing their ideology and making them feel as though the light that they're shining into the world, which of course is only sort of, you know, abuse being circulated amongst each other, is actually functional, is doing something.
So, cults really benefit from a kind of external object of action that they can measure their own sort of piety against, but then also pretend to be better than, and then pretend to offer a solution to.
And it seems like it's performative in a way that's probably good for recruitment, right?
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
You looked so bright and shiny at this tense event, and I wonder what your secret is.
And, oh, well, let me tell you about the messages that I've received from, you know, the Galactic Federation or from, you know, the master teacher or whatever.
It kind of perpetuates the metaphysics that, you know, whatever conflict is going on on the ground is a reflection of something happening in higher dimensions that actually I'm very actively participating in, even though I just seem to be smiling serenely.
Yeah, absolutely.
You know, we've got...
We've got limited time here so I'm going to put the Zach Bush commentary, well actually just his Instagram post into our show notes.
The key note here is that his sort of armchair or actually I guess podium sermonizing from afar happened, was published to Instagram maybe the day after or the day of the Capitol ransack, but it contains the line, this is great, it's like a masterpiece of spiritual both sides-isms.
He says, just as viruses do not take down healthy humans, revolutions do not take down healthy governance.
So he provides this reflection on the events at the Capitol along with a provocative photo of the Capitol building itself and basically gives this, you know,
A sermon from on high about how the organism of state is purging itself of necessary poisons, which is actually the promotion of the ransack narrative and politics.
It pretends to be above the battleground, but there's no identification of, well, actually this was a carefully planned for weeks in advance incited by one particular leader and, you know, the lives of, of the political class are threatened all in one day.
No, this is kind of, this is normal sort of purgative action where, you know, political violence is, is some sort of cleansing.
Yeah.
Pretty disgusting.
I wanted to spend the last little bit of time on an incredible essay published by Kelly Brogan to her blog and, And this is not in reference to the insurrection at all, although she gets in on the vibe by Naming the blog, Health as Spiritual Warfare.
So, it's kind of amazing.
Obviously, warfare, conflict is on everybody's mind.
And, you know, Dr. Brogan just runs with it.
So, I've got a couple of graphs here.
She begins with, Have you had an experience recently of trying to share information with someone who, even if they engaged with a video or article of your choice, seemed completely impervious to it, like scientific facts and data did nothing to change their perspective.
Like scientific facts about terrain theory and the fact that COVID doesn't exist.
Then she writes, we are entering a post-science world.
And you're a big part of that, lady.
It's getting so meta.
It's getting so incredibly self-reflexive.
It's like the post-modernity meter is just off the charts here.
Anyway, she goes on, and like when wars were fought and blood was shed over seeming differences in religious doctrine, ideology, and faith, as though this isn't happening as she speaks, right?
We are now in a spiritual war and your body is the battlefield.
What is being ushered in under the cover of a pandemic is the fulfillment of what it was initiated with Homeland Security under the cover of terrorist attacks, protection from, okay, so she's a 9-11 truther as well, protection from an unseen enemy, justifying the stripping of liberties and ever-expanding surveillance and control of the people for our safety. justifying the stripping of liberties and ever-expanding surveillance and control And of course, there's like 10-15% of that woven in with regard to the surveillance of late-stage capitalism and the security state.
And I have to...
I have to break in here, because this is the thing when reading that essay, is the cat part.
Well, I'm going to get to there.
I have things to say, but go ahead.
I have things to say, but go ahead.
Wait, wait, wait.
Okay, so it's a very long essay.
And one of the things that I wanted to point out is that I'm not going to compare it to, I know that Brogan is friends with Charles Eisenstein, and they both write very, very long essays.
And I would say that just both would benefit so much from being on Slack with a couple of people and running drafts by each other.
And like, because this one, Dr. Brogan, you really should have sat on for a bit because you begin to turn this scene of medical authoritarianism into this very personal argument or example of what's happening in her own home, but with her cats.
So she spirals into this sort of self-criticism theme.
She says, then there's our cats.
These creatures have brought many... She loves her cats.
They've taught me a lot.
Sovereign love, even the ethics of animal consumption.
I don't know if she was thinking about eating the cats or not eating the cats.
I don't know.
But she says, recently my cats started itching a lot.
I tried the quote-unquote natural stuff, including essential oils and diatomaceous earth, and it didn't quote-unquote work.
When my kitty had a streak of blood on his fluffy white shin from scratching, Something in me said, okay, this has to be dealt with.
He's suffering.
Oh, not the scratching for weeks on end?
That didn't trigger it for you?
No, it didn't.
No, no.
Just the blood.
No, just the blood.
I know how to investigate the risks of a chemical.
I've subjected just about every category of human medical preparations to this scrutiny.
Red flag number one was that I chose not to do any meaningful research into the risks of the flea chemical when considering a single-dose insecticide to, quote, get rid of the fleas.
I reasoned that my cats are fed an organic raw diet, have never been vaccinated, and are treated energetically by healers regularly, not to mention smothered with love by a family of six.
This is all being written during an insurrection.
Evidently, right?
This is what is going through the doctor's brain.
It's not only that a good portion of especially women's alt-health is centered in shame and self-criticism, but now we have to add cats into the mix.
And shame about whether or not we're going to give them flea chemicals?
Anyway, so she talks about how this violates all of her reasons.
She catches herself, though.
And, you know, she talks about this behavior of wanting to go towards the flea medication and how the costs of that behavior include, but are not limited to, loss of integrity around my committed beliefs and degradation of my word.
The ongoing energetic maintenance of the secret.
She talks about how she hides the decision to apply the flea chemical to the cat from her children and that means that she's shamefully keeping a secret that is out of integrity or alignment with her beliefs about natural health.
I just have to say that the heroic confession that's going on here makes me feel such empathy for her.
It's so, like, it's so tortured.
I mean, it humanizes her.
I know we're getting to something, the part that blew my mind the most, but I have to say this.
Fuck people who don't know how to take care of cats and expect them to be their little fucking things they can carry in their purse.
And I don't know if that's her, but I will say this.
I've had my cat right behind me right now is almost 21 years old.
He's been vaccinated every year.
He's gotten flea medication.
He's eaten shit food and he's eaten good food.
And he sleeps on my shoulder every single night.
That's why he's alive, Derek, because you have shamanic powers.
We have three cats and they're all insane, but we bring them to the fucking doctor because the average lifespan of a cat who's feral that does not have family is two years.
Two years.
The average lifespan of a domesticated cat is 15 to 20 years, depending on breed.
Sorry.
So this whole, and to compare that to her children and then where it gets to, go ahead.
Wait, wait, wait, wait.
Yeah.
We're coming up to it.
Okay.
So anyway, so there's all these sins that she's committing in considering to use the flea medication.
And then she says, you know, but what does it mean for me to protect my cats if not with pharma chemicals?
Well, they are kittens, they are babies.
And the presence of these fleas could represent some physiological terrain susceptibility.
And, It could represent an energetic expression of needing more time in the dark, which would make sense considering we just merged families and now they have four children's hands all over them.
Or it could mean something spiritual.
To me, the energy of fleas or lice or parasites on a dependent animal can be seen through the archetypal lens of the human child predator.
The Abuser Molester Victimizer.
My kitties were being violated under my roof, if you will, and instead of supporting them and truly resolving the violation, I turned towards another abusive system, the chemical industry for help.
The very system that enculturates those doubts in me that I actually can't do it.
I believe that there is a time and place for a firm and clear no No, you are not welcome here.
When an adult's hand is reaching for a child's genitals, I should have done a trigger warning here.
This is so weird.
It's not the time for compassion.
It's the time for a boundary.
And so I do believe that in the meditative space, I can create that boundary of protection from invasive predators for my children and my pets.
And so?
How does and so?
I can use visualization.
I can use Qigong.
I can work to create that energetic boundary around their bodies.
I can also put my intention, faith, and attention towards this challenge.
I can brush them and tend to them while working to establish a harmonious correction of this imbalance.
Oh my...
I'll just tell you what the ENSO is.
The ENSO is, as a writer, her brain was spiraling and she was trying to make all these connections that didn't make sense, and then after inserting the genital comment in there, that was her only way of trying to be like, and that relates to this.
Yeah, so, okay, what's going on with... I mean, this is somebody who's just completely on her own as a writer, too, right?
There's nobody looking over your shoulder and saying nobody.
But how lonely that is.
How incredibly lonely to not have somebody over your shoulder who can say, hey, wait a minute.
First of all, you're comparing fleas to sexual molesters.
And then you're comparing yourself to a child molester for the idea.
For the idea that you were going to use a chemical, so there's battling molesters in your house instead of the free, natural, organic way of doing things.
And what is she saying?
That she can use Qigong to get rid of not only fleas, but if the metaphor is carried back, that Qigong and the energetic meditation of her perfect parenting, would that actually provide perfect that Qigong and the energetic meditation of her perfect parenting, would that actually provide Because I'm sorry, but no, that's not true.
That's not it.
Putting your child in a bubble of light when they get on a plane.
It's a nice thing to do, but I mean... Yeah, I wouldn't want to wish anything terrible on her kids ever or anyone's kids, but reality will call your bluff, right?
And we're not only critiquing her writing style here and the lack of editing and doing multiple drafts or having someone give her input, we're also criticizing her thought.
process.
And what I have found over the last 25 years is that this is how a lot of people who get deep into this kind of metaphysical confusion think about things.
There's all of this like bizarre set of premises that lead to an insane conclusion, but they think they're being consistent with their wacky belief system.
And meanwhile, her cats are suffering because of it.
Yes, that's right.
That's right.
Yeah.
And I mean, it's also, you can feel the overwhelming emotion in the passage as well.
And the tangle of internal conflicts and shame and the faith battle and the dark night of the soul that is sort of like encapsulated and shrunk down to the level, to the scale of the human cat interaction when you You know, at least her headline reflects the possibility that she knows that the world is teetering on the brink.
It's worse than that, too, because all of that is also being done in this performative way, where she's essentially saying, let me tell you a personally revealing story that will be sort of a teachable moment, right?
The Jab, our weekly segment on the crucial COVID vaccine and the misinformation conspiritualists love to spread about it.
Let's talk about Disneyland.
Listeners may remember that the happiest place on earth was the site of a major measles outbreak in 2014, which led to California strengthening the law requiring vaccination.
Measles was considered eradicated in the US in 2000, but it came roaring back due to the efforts of people like Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
in spreading misinformation and vaccine alarmism.
The highly contagious measles virus can live on surfaces for hours and has what's called an R of between 12 and 18, which means that each person infected will likely go on to infect that many in turn.
The 2014 outbreak led to over 150 cases in multiple states and into Mexico and Canada and took months to contain.
Before the vaccine became available in 1963, measles killed on average 2.6 million people each year.
Now, 2019 saw over 1,200 confirmed cases of measles in the US, and the CDC estimated that 89% of those cases were in unvaccinated children.
That year, Disneyland also had an exposure event, which was thankfully nipped in the bud quite quickly.
Nonetheless, that year's cases were at a 28-year high, the main reason being vaccine hesitancy.
Now, as Los Angeles COVID cases rush to break 1 million, with over 13,000 deaths, the good news is that the stomping ground of Mickey Mouse and other iconic cartoon characters is set to become host to a massive vaccination site that will be able to deliver thousands of doses a day.
Orange County's largest employer, located in the city of Anaheim and currently shut down, losing Southern California billions of dollars in lost tourist revenue, will be one of five Orange County Point of Distribution, or POD, sites as part of Operation Independence.
Vaccine availability is managed by the California Department of Public Health, and vaccines have been available to law enforcement, first responders, and those over 75 so far.
Plans were in place for expanded availability to include education and child care workers, people over 65, and the homeless starting in February, but as of this Wednesday, that group has also been made eligible right away.
Dodger Stadium is also being readied as another huge site for dispensing as many as 12,000 vaccine doses per day.
RPM.
Eddy is the CEO of Ergo, one of the world's leading intelligence firms.
He began his career as a director at the White House National Security Council under Bill Clinton.
And from there, he moved on to be the chief of staff to U.S.
Ambassador Richard Holbrook, as well as senior policy offer to United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan.
He was also one of the principal architects behind the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria.
I came across Eddie's work a few years ago when he co-wrote a book with Richard Clarke called Warnings, Finding Cassandras to Stop Catastrophes.
And I actually got to interview him last June because one of those Cassandras that he wrote about in his book was the lack of preparation for a pandemic.
So you can imagine all of the different vectors that we intersected at at this time between pandemics and the riots.
And I wanted to talk to him, and we happened to stay in touch.
So I had some questions to ask him how he felt about this past week in America, and perhaps most importantly to all of us, what he thinks about the coming week, the coming months, and the coming years ahead.
Well, it's been a few months since we last talked during the pandemic at the very beginning, and there's been some things that are happening.
There are a number of things I want to talk to you about, but let's start with something I think is on a lot of people's minds, which is how much danger do you see this country being in over the next week leading to the inauguration?
I was very concerned for a few days, and I'm concerned about something slightly non-obvious, but punchline, I don't think it ought to be too bad.
Because we're now prepared, because we now see who the foe is, and because the police departments around the country are on high alert, I just came down my driveway here and there's a police officer The governor lives near us so the police are already beginning to prepare around governors around capitals and we work with a number of states we've talked to them and so I I think we're prepared now and the concern I had was
The Capitol Police, you can look at those videos, and one thing you can see is an extraordinary lack of preparation, which is just a fact.
You also can see extraordinary restraint by the police officers.
You know, a man getting crushed in a door, beaten in the face, doesn't reach for his pistol.
That's restraint, and there's examples of that over and over.
A patchwork of training across the country of different police departments, a patchwork of what you would imagine as anticipated restraint.
So I'm not sure, I wasn't sure that we could expect that.
And I was working with, you know, speaking to the governors I talked to and the police executives I talked to and reminding them that they need to be talking about the rules of engagement.
They need to tell those one million police officers in America who watch the same videos you and I did, many of whom are going to be scared and some of whom might be angry, We have to practice restraint.
The MAGA group, Trumpland, is going to show up on the 17th to the 20th, perhaps.
If they do, there's going to be confrontations.
If those police are properly protected, they won't be as scared.
And if they are led to be restrained, then I think we'll be fine.
That's in this week, right?
Well, yeah, I want to get longer term.
But do you think that the coming out and processing or persecuting some of these individuals, or prosecuting is the right word, for sedition is going to help people stay away from DC?
Yeah, yes.
I think that, you know, enforce the law, go after the folks that clearly broke the law.
They just arrested the man who threw the fire extinguisher and killed the police officer.
And that has to happen.
That will have to some extent a chilling effect, yes.
What we know from counterinsurgency work, and we should talk about insurrection versus insurgency and where are we, is that with you, first of all, you have to Go after the folks who are visibly breaking the law.
And as I just described, you also need to take down the acolytes.
So I think there's a second question about going after some of the people who, you know, really threw political gasoline on this and incitement.
And then you get to this obvious question of like, aren't you just going to make it worse?
Aren't you going to incite more anger because they'll feel persecuted versus just illegally prosecuted?
In that answer, I'm not concerned because the hardcore colonel, and we should talk about who they are, is already untethered to reality and part of their untethering is that they deeply already feel persecuted and that the system is rigged against them.
I don't think they could feel worse about that.
So I think it's a good tactical and strategic move and it's just what laws are for, to go after the lawbreakers.
And how do you feel about what's happening with the technology companies deplatforming both individuals and then Amazon shutting down Parler?
Is that going to help or is that going to be a net negative in the long term?
Well, the first thing that comes to mind all the time is some tweet I read about gay wedding cakes, which I think is just perfect explanation, right?
What we obviously have is, I refer to a court case that said, this bakery said they don't want to make a wedding cake for a gay couple.
Should they be forced to do it?
And the court said, no, you're a private business.
You don't have to be forced to make a gay wedding cake.
Nor does Twitter, nor does Facebook, nor does AWS, nor can they be forced to have clients they don't want to have.
So is it legally all right?
Sure.
Will this drive them into deeper, darker recesses of the internet where we won't be able to see them?
I don't think so.
If they're not already using Signal or Wicker, then they'll get there eventually.
One of the concepts of terrorism is that you incite terror, and you can't really do that hidden inside an encrypted Wicker chat with five of your best friends.
They do want to get the word out more broadly.
And I also happen to think it's appropriate, by the way.
So is it legal?
Yes.
Is it going to lead to a harder time investigating them?
No, probably not.
And is it appropriate?
100%.
I think it's, I think, you know, hate speech, yelling fire in a crowded theater.
There's all these examples we grew up understanding.
They apply here.
I have no problem with deplatforming them.
Yeah.
Our podcast specifically was started after the intersection of QAnon with the wellness industry.
A lot of the figures that we track have come out and they're making the freedom of speech argument.
How do you intelligently push back against that and tell them that the freedom of speech has nothing to do with private industry?
In fact, it's the free market working how it's supposed to work.
Well, first there's the question of how interested am I in pushing back against some people who are untethered, and I'm less and less interested.
That's part one.
Part two, what argument would I make?
I think we just described some of it.
It's private industry.
You're presumably libertarian or on the right, if those are the folks you're talking to.
Don't you believe in gay wedding cake legislation or legal cases?
So there you go.
And, you know, the issue is, can that same person go sit on the street corner on a soapbox and scream and yell that vaccines have microchips or that, you know, the Democrats eat baby fetuses in the basement of the Capitol?
Yes, he can.
Or she can.
And I would defend their right to do it.
I'd also defend the right of a platform company to not have them invite them on the platform.
Yeah.
Well, let's go back then about the Capitol.
In our email, you had specifically called out from your book, Warnings, the invisible, obvious, and failure to imagine.
Why did the police fail to imagine what was possible last week?
I stand on the shoulders of a bunch of other people who make this argument better than I do, but we have a 140,000-year-old wet computer between our ears, which is part rat, part chicken, part monkey, and then only a little bit human.
Those deeper aspects of who we are are really designed to allow us to navigate and be successful inside a tribe.
One argument from a neurological point of view or a cognitive science point of view about, you know, the two pounds between our ears is that it really is optimized to make sure that you can thrive and survive in a tribe.
And I remind, you know, you, or maybe not you, Derek, because you're probably always so popular, but I know in my childhood and looking at my children, those moments when I wasn't invited to that birthday party or my children weren't invited to that lacrosse party, it deeply, deeply hurts.
Right.
Now, it's not because they don't get the birthday cake.
It's because of something else, something very limbic.
And what it is, is our monkey brains telling us, hey, you're not part of the tribe.
That literally could be deadly.
Right.
When the Mastodons come over the hill and the Sabertooth Tigers come around the corner, you need that tribe.
Or when it's time to divvy up food, you need to be liked.
So we have this deep system in us about tribes.
And part of how we understand tribes, now this obviously gets deeply to biases, right?
We can go on about black-white bias, etc.
You can see where that goes.
It gets to, you know, what I just referred to as, there's probably an official term for it, but like tribal markers.
How do I know if you're in my tribe or not, right?
So when I look at you now, Derek, I see a bike behind you.
And can I affiliate with you on an exercise basis?
You have a beard.
Oh, you and I are somewhat similar.
You have a very aggressive orange shirt on.
Well, look how aggressive the yellow is on my book.
You know, like we can try to find things that are, you know, commonalities.
If you think about the tribe, the group that walked up on Capitol Hill, And you look at the police officers who were supposed to plan to prepare to prevent this, the executives who were in charge of protecting this, they both probably shared color, they probably shared age, they probably shared gender, they probably had the same bumper stickers, they had the same vexology, they liked the same flags, they had the same limbic beliefs, right?
So this concept of the invisible obvious is You're just sort of, you're not blinded to, but you're, in this instance, they are blinded, it's a bias, but you're just not seeing something that's profoundly obvious.
So the example that I read and we put in our book is about steam coming out of a kettle.
So steam has been coming out of kettles since as long as there was a kettle and there was a fire.
And it took James Watt, you know, who kicked off the Industrial Revolution, to look at that steam and say, you know, that's actually power.
And it had been sitting in everyone's stove forever and he saw power and there's all these great stories of invisible obvious this will go down as one of them right it was so obvious but it was invisible to them by virtue of bias I think because of tribal marking there was a couple other reasons that which we can talk about if you'd like that are sort of correlated but I think in that instance that's what I mean by visible obvious You've also heard the expression failure to imagine.
Pearl Harbor was a failure to imagine.
9-11 was a failure to imagine or an inability to connect the dots.
There's all these phrases we use in intelligence analysis for when we make these mistakes.
They're all saying similar things.
This is just so stark though.
Anybody who had half a mind to pay attention knew This was coming.
And so it is interesting to wonder how did the planning process go so far astray?
How did they completely blow this?
And they did, by the way.
Yeah, absolutely.
Well, I'm sure you've been paying attention, at least loosely or maybe intensely, on what's been happening on the Senate floor this week with the impeachment hearings, but also the grandstanding and the refusing to go through metal detectors and the reasons for that.
So do you think our leaders are still failing to imagine right now?
No, no.
I don't think our leaders are.
I don't think those people who are grandstanding, as you appropriately put it, are failing to imagine the evil that sits within a hardened group of, you know, the Boogaloo Boys and all these far-right extreme groups, many of whom showed up on Capitol Hill and broke through the doors and, you know, led to five deaths.
Like, I don't think they failed to imagine that.
I do believe part of it still is this tribal marking and bias, but I think for the political leaders, and this is different than others, for the political leaders I think it's just craven self-interest.
So look at Ted Cruz.
I've spent time with Ted Cruz.
I really don't know many more obnoxious people.
I've spent like real time with him.
He is profoundly obnoxious, but he's also quite bright.
So Ted Cruz, and he's not, he's not a ideological firebrand, right?
He's, he's, he, I, my strong, strong educated guess is he doesn't like deeply, deeply care that, you know, the election was stolen and stopped the steal.
I don't think he buys that at all.
I think he looks at this and he looks at the political wins and he made a bet pre-December 6th and during December 6th and he's still kind of on it.
He's not quite doubling down, but he's still got his chit on red and that red happens to be MAGA land or Trump land.
And he's saying, These people, these voters, are going to be what I, in a self-interested, craven way, am going to need to get my next Senate seat, or to become governor, or whatever is next in his mind, president, whatever.
By the way, talking about a man who will never be president.
I hope I don't have to eat my shoe on that one.
But, you know, that's who, that's the bet this guy was making, and Holly probably similarly.
So, again, Craven self-interest, probably follow the money.
You know, Trump's got a quarter billion dollars now that he grifted from his followers.
Yes, it was absolutely a grift.
Like, can he get some of that?
Probably not, by the way.
Are there big donors?
The Sheldon Adelstein, who just died, are there big donors like that around him who are going to come to Cruz?
I wonder if, in his heart of hearts, if Cruz now looks at the bet he made, you know, sleeping with the devil, and watched what happened on December 6th, and says, damn it, I backed the wrong horse.
I tied myself to the wrong horse.
I don't want to be in Trump land, you know?
So, craven self-interest.
Now, you had mentioned before some of the other things that happened last week, and one thing we were talking on email, you said about service and law enforcement and who do they serve.
We've seen the images of one of the officers taking a selfie with the insurrectionists, I think is the right term, and he was put on leave or fired.
Obviously one thing that came across all my social media feeds that day was the comparison of watching how the police handled the Black Lives Matter protests and then how they were handling and showing restraint that day.
So who do the police serve and do you think that they did the right thing in the way that they acted last week?
So let's try to answer this in two parts.
One, I want to be honest about my opinion of some of those behaviors, and it might be a little different than your listeners are going to sign up for.
And then I want to talk about, again, the mental frame that I think the planners, not so much the police officers, were in.
Similar, we talked about invisible obvious.
I think there's also this question of like, wait, who do I serve again?
Law enforcement, law and order.
So let's start with the first one.
I do not know anything more about that police officer who was in the selfie than the 10 second clip of him leaning into a protester and smiling and mugging for a shot.
I don't know what was before that or after that.
I've worked on Capitol Hill.
I'm sure you've been there, and a lot of the people on the line have.
There's really two and a half parts of Capitol Hill, right?
There's one part that is the Disneyland of politics, where the police officer's job in that part is to let the tourists walk the halls and to tell them where the bathroom is, to tell them they cannot chew gum, to tell them we close in five minutes, and to tell them here's where you can get a Coca-Cola.
That is, they are literally the Disney security guards.
That is a big part of their job.
In that instance, the people's house, they are tour guides, you know, and that's a lot of what they do.
The other part of what they do is some of the imagery we've seen of protecting the sanctity of the hearing process and the security of the members.
It's a different function and it requires different responses.
So some of the imagery you've seen of the people with the pink hats on, I forgot what they're called and I don't want to get the name wrong, you know, them protesting in the middle of a hearing and then getting arrested and handcuffed and forcibly dragged out.
You look at that and you go, whoa, that same police force is the one over here mugging with, you know, the boogaloo boy?
What the hell is going on?
It's a different frame in their head, right?
I know inside a hearing, if the gavel goes down and they say, give me silence please, my job is to arrest the people.
Over here, outside those doors, my job is to tell them not to chew gum.
So that's a reality we have to be aware of.
To this other point about, you know, who do I wait?
I phrase it as like, wait, who do I serve again?
Right.
The intel analysts, the police officers are law enforcement officers.
They're deeply invested in law enforcement, law and order.
The number one law enforcement officer in America.
People say it's the attorney general.
Who's he report to?
The president.
Right?
So, I'm not saying they're Republicans, I'm not saying they're Trumpites, but I'm saying, you know, everything they've ever learned is the President is law and order, and the Constitution is law and order, and he's the Commander-in-Chief.
And I think it was a very hard mental frame, part of the bias we had before, to move from this frame of Black Lives Matter, which they very clearly see as non-affiliated with the chain of command, these are chain of command people, right?
Black Lives Matter doesn't look like chain of command.
It doesn't talk like chain of command.
There's a Black Lives Matter police problem, right?
There are respected members of law enforcement who I like, Chief Bratton, and I can say it because he said it publicly.
has a problem with the Black Lives Matter movement because a number of NYPD cops were shot and killed by people who claim to be Black Lives Matter.
I think he's conflating all sorts of things.
I think we have a real problem about the imaging and the messaging of Black Lives Matter.
But again, there's a real problem inside policing with Black Lives Matter and Blue Lives Matter and all that stuff.
So, but here this gets to the third point.
So there's three reasons they blew it, I think.
One is the invisible lobbyist.
Two is this, wait, law enforcement, who do I work for?
The President of the United States is actually part of a coup?
I can't frame that.
And I'm not saying that that's a Magaland, you know, political bias.
I think it's just like, he's the law enforcement officer.
I don't quite get that something so affiliated with him is illegal.
I just think it was a framing problem.
The third thing, which I should just mention quickly, so I'm going on, but I can do it fast.
The June 1st Lafayette Square catastrophe, or there's a better word for it, deeply scarred law enforcement and military officials, the right-minded ones in this country, and rank-and-file law enforcement, because they all looked like totalitarian shits, right?
So, when you had the Attorney General of the United States, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, escorting, you know, the president who looks like the color of your shirt across Pennsylvania Avenue as they were busting up protesters with sticks and pepper spray balls, using the frickin' military to do it, and then going up to a church where he held a Bible upside down, you know, so clearly violating peaceful protest First Amendment rights.
To support a demagogue, they all realized they had fallen for it, right?
Many, many of the, and of course Milley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, wrote an apology letter.
Like, how often does that happen, right?
So these guys were like, whoa, okay, bad move, right?
Over-militarization, you know, kind of, again, went into their framing of, let's not do that again.
So when the news of January 6th was coming up, There is also this pendulum swing over correction issue.
Hold on, hold on.
You know what?
Maybe we were too harsh on Black Lives Matter.
Maybe we were too harsh.
On June 1 at Lafayette Square.
And I, as the head of the Capitol Police, you know, talking to my members, his bosses are the members of the Congress.
I don't want to do that again.
And the National Guard guys said, I don't want to be in that lens again.
So they over-corrected the wrong direction, you know.
And as I mentioned at the top, my concern is now we'll swing back a third time and they'll over-correct to violence.
But I feel like we're okay with that.
On the 17th and 20th, when When the protesters show up at the capitals, as I said from the top.
But I think we're OK.
Well, how about the state capitals?
Do you foresee any problems there?
Do you think that every state is going to have proper enforcement in place?
I was just talking to a police leader right before our talk, Derek.
I was thinking she was thinking very, very tactically.
And she said, well, look, one thing is by saying hit all 50 state capitals and DC, they're distributing their forces, which is interesting.
And I thought about it that way.
And the other point I made before is there's really a patchwork of competency, there's a patchwork of mindset and restraint amongst different police departments, right?
You know, would you want to be a black man pulled over for speeding in Alabama in 1945?
Or a black man pulled over for speeding in Las, you know, Paris in 2020, right?
I mean, there's different police officers respond to things very, very differently.
And I hope that wasn't insensitive.
If you now look, different police officers, different police departments, you know, have different training, different restraint.
I am quite sure that of those 50 capitals, there's probably seven or eight where you're going to have really serious protests show up.
And you can, they're probably the swing states, the states that swing for the right, you know, the Dakotas and Texas and Michigan and other places.
I'm quite sure of all those police departments and the other auxiliary troops they're bringing in, there will be pods of people who are really pissed and they want to pull the trigger.
I just hope that doesn't happen, but they're going to be prepared.
They're going to be protected.
They will have on their full riot gear.
The horses will be out, you know, and that's a good thing because it You know, conversely to what we're saying about the Black Lives Matter over militarization of Lafayette Square, when police officers have those hard shells on and lots of people around them, they feel safer and they're less likely to resort to using their guns.
Now, you've been in government and worked with agencies inside and in your business for a long time, and I don't know how familiar you are with QAnon.
Obviously, you know the basics.
You expressed them before.
But you have Marjorie Taylor Greene, who is a QAnon devotee now in Congress, and her saying she's going to impeach Biden.
And again, it's grandstanding.
But one thing We can avoid is the fact of how conspiracy theories have proliferated over this past year, especially.
And in your experience at the top levels of of government, how do you how do you deal with conspiracy theories?
You know, I'd love to spend some more time with you because I know you spend a lot of time thinking about in your conspiracy.
I don't say conspirituality podcast.
And this is something that you really expert on.
I have I have spent a lot of time with police departments.
I help I support the NYPD Counterterrorism and Intelligence Division post 9-11 and I was the commissioner of the Los Angeles Police Department's Counterterrorism Committee and so I do understand police, I do understand intelligence to an extent.
I have not been a police officer.
And I have a It's a passing understanding of QAnon and I find it hard to read more about it because it's just so simply absurd that it's hard for me to dig into it.
But, as we all know, and I'm sure you've said in your talk a thousand times probably in the beginning, conspiracy is the way people make sense of a world they don't understand.
So, conspiracy theories are how humans deal with one of the most painful emotions we can have, which is powerlessness, right?
So, I was there when the second tower fell on 9-11, and it was that horrible, and I lost friends, and many people did.
I had worked on Al Qaeda since 94, so I knew what happened.
It was very clear to me.
There was no question.
There are other people who've had that same amount of limbic pain of watching that tower fall.
We all did it together.
That didn't, for whatever reason, want to believe in this thing they couldn't put their finger on called Al Qaeda.
And what was the Taliban?
And what was Afghanistan?
Remember in the beginning, it was very hard to know what this all was.
And so they were able to glom on this thing.
It made more sense.
And for some distressing people, it was a certain religion did it, and for others it was an inside job.
Whatever, right?
It allowed them to get more sovereignty over their sense of powerlessness.
And you know that.
So sorry if that's completely refreshing, something you've talked about over and over.
Most leaders of the US government, minus the US Capitol, minus the Congress, don't really fall for conspiracy theories.
It's in my experience.
The U.S.
Congress was described to me by a U.S.
Congressman who was a former colleague and friend as a, quote, profoundly representative body.
Now, that's a good thing, because that's what it's supposed to be, the House of the People.
It's a bad thing when you talk about members, like you just mentioned, who probably have fallen for this completely absurd conspiracy theory called QAnon.
Now, it's good she's representing her people.
That probably means the people who voted for her kind of fall for it, too.
And she's going to create a vicious cycle and continue to support that, because now a member of Congress says so.
Much like we saw with the President of the United States and 120 or 140 members of Congress saying that the election was stolen.
I do want to make another comment on QAnon though, but I'll pause there.
and to respect their presidency and government officials.
And they said it was stolen.
And this crazy woman says QAnon is real.
That's a bad thing.
I do want to make another comment on QAnon though, but I'll pause there.
If I even approached your very good question, I'd be surprised.
Well, no, and it's not about your, you know, I've spent the last, what, nine, 10 months on this podcast, looking deeply into what these people are thinking and saying and transmitting.
So I don't expect a lot of people to have that.
But just in your position, there has been a lot of... I'm sure you've come a lot of conspiratorial thinking.
So I was thinking more of a big picture, which you did address.
I do have just one more question, but if you have another thought on QAnon, I'd love to hear it before we close up with that.
I do.
I'm going to try to do some work on this.
And maybe you can help me, Derek.
I want to begin to amass evidence of something that I...
I know to be true, and I know because I've seen spots of it and I've talked to extraordinarily high level people in the U.S.
military who tell me it's true, but they can't go further than that.
QAnon is deeply infiltrating the U.S.
military and some of our special forces groups.
And I do know from experience, you can't walk on a U.S.
military base these days and not see a Q sticker or other symbology of the group.
To me that is profoundly distressing.
Now we do have this question about an insurrection, excuse me, an insurgency in America.
There's another conversation to be had about identifying domestic terrorist groups, allowing the FBI and others to expand investigative powers against them.
But I think that I'm going to try to put together some examples of this where the Biden administration, or actually I shouldn't even frame it that way, the government can become more aware of the infiltration of this dangerous ideology into our military and can Figure out how to address it because I think it is a growing problem.
And I suspect you know more about than I do, Derek.
So maybe I'll come back to you.
We can generate some ideas.
Great.
Yeah, I have we have amassed a number of resources that I'll share with you offline about this.
But yeah, I would love to help any way I can.
We started talking about, you know, the next week and it makes me happy that you think that it Hopefully won't be as bad as we can imagine, but this insurgency is not going away.
And I'd just like to wrap up by asking, what are your fears and concerns over the next few months and maybe the first year of the Biden administration about what this morphs into and what dangers it poses to us?
In some ways, what happened on January 6th is a blessing for the Republic.
By the violence, the far-right aspects of Trumplandia and Trump and his acolytes have revealed themselves in a way that the Sinn Féin revealed themselves to Ireland and the IRA in the Oma bombing in, I think, 1989.
Violence forces us to look in a mirror and see what we're signing up for.
And so, you know, you had McCarthy, the majority speaker, the leader of the House minority, come out and say, President of the United States incited this violence.
You had 10 members or 12 members of the GOP vote to impeach the president.
So this does a couple of things.
One, it deeply depowers Donald Trump individually.
So he really did have a powerful political future ahead of him.
He has amassed a quarter or $300 million at this point.
He was going to try to launch Ivanka into Marco Rubio's seat in the Senate in Florida.
His other kids and in-laws were looking at things.
That whole dynasty is in trouble right now, right?
So his financial dynasty is in trouble.
Obviously, Deutsche Bank and others have said, no more for you.
He's got two buildings that need to be refinanced soon.
He's got New York State and New York City DAs looking at prosecuting him.
That was a problem he had already.
He possibly has legal challenges from this.
He might even get convicted in an impeachment, although I don't know what the bets are on that.
So he's gone away to some extent as a problem for for the next presidency.
That's good.
The rumblings inside the Senate and the House about, you know, he's not a legitimate president.
That's just that's going to be quieter now.
Right.
That's good.
And the thing I'm more concerned about, Derek, and I guess we can talk about some other time if you want, is the longer, you know, past a few months, right?
So, so just in general, and let me sort of leave, leave with a, you know, kind of an unhappy thought, right?
There are 30 million super angry Americans right now.
By my math, the people in America look at the siege on Capitol Hill and say, sign me up.
I'm thinking that's about 30 million Americans.
There's some polling to support that.
Now, of that group, some of them are soft-minded clowns that are just automatons who were gaslighted by their president.
And that is a group, and if you watch the citizen reporting and the interviews of people, there's people up there you just look at and go, oh my god, you poor soul, you were absorbed by this narcissistic, sociopathic demagogue, you fell for it, your life's a mess, it was already, you're a drug addict, whatever.
There's a group of those people.
I'm not giving them any leeway for the horrors they committed, but there's them.
There is also a hardened, violent, and murderous kernel of people.
That group believes they have won.
They look at January 6th as a moment of victory, as their Bastille Day, as an annealing moment.
The reason they were taking all those selfies and all those pictures, which they're now being prosecuted from, is because they wanted to go home and show them off to all their family.
They were very proud of what they did.
They are still very proud of what they did.
That group has a big overlap with ownership of assault weapons.
That group has a perfect overlap with the ability to access the internet and access a hardware store.
That group also has a high overlap with a lack of self-sovereignty or digital literacy.
They fall for limbic hijacking.
We've already seen it.
They can be guided in other ways, right?
So why do I mention hardware stores and why do I mention assault weapons?
Well, all it takes is a very small number or one person and an assault weapon to give you a new town.
All it takes is a very small number or one person and some diesel fuel and some fertilizer to give you an Oklahoma City bombing.
So there are sort of probably more of these people now by virtue of the recruitment ultimately incited by the president.
They are perhaps, quote unquote, more angry.
Although the question of their mindset, you know, pre-Trump and after Trump is worth exploring at some point.
So the level of violence is probably unfortunately going to go up. .
And so long term, that's sort of a tactical point of view, long term I'm concerned about that.
And then very quickly, strategically, I do think we're beginning to enter in perhaps a, you know, again, a more annealed, more they are prouder of themselves, a group in an insurgency posture in the United States, far right insurgency posture, and that's a concern as well.
